Black And Blue (Quentin Black Mystery #5) (21 page)

He said it to the rest of them as much as he did Roscoe.

Someone rushed him from behind the workout bars. Their hands grabbed at him from behind, gripping his neck.

Black didn’t hesitate.

Throwing his elbow back, he felt the nose break of the man behind him with a satisfying crunch. He turned into the hit to get him to release his neck, following the slam with a back-fist from the same arm.
 

A third man came into the fray and Black threw his weight back into the guy he’d just hit, using him for leverage now that he had him pinned to the bars. He kicked the new assailant in the chest with both feet, throwing him to the cement. In the process, he slammed into broken nose a third time, knocking his skull hard into the metal bar they’d been using for chin-ups.
 

When Black straightened, broken nose slid to the ground, knocked out. A fourth guy approached Black before he could catch his breath, a thick-necked bald man with a heavily tattooed face. Black turned, executing a low roundhouse kick with his full weight.

He aimed that one into the side of new man’s knee joint.

The big guy with the tattooed face went down with a scream.

When he landed heavily on his knees, screaming again, Black swung around with another round-house, that one higher, and aimed at his throat.

The big guy was down for real then, choking on the ground.

That was four.

Well, three and a half.

If Roscoe recovered from that throat punch, he might still be in this.

The dark-eyed guy who’d been watching him from behind Roscoe was smiling now.

Black watched him, turning in a circle, keeping his back to the prison compound. When he glanced to his right, he saw Dog, Easton, Frank and Devin pounding their way across the dirt path. Frank and Easton, at least, would even things up a lot. And they were only a fraction of the chiefs. He looked back at the remainder of the Aryans.

“This is over,” he said. “You got your answer. Leave me the fuck alone.”

The shorter man with the dark eyes and the eagle tattoo on his neck stepped forward.

“Oh, it ain’t over, chief,” he said, smiling.

Black looked at him, feeling a cold prickle at the back of his neck.
 

He was about to answer when a sudden, blinding pain shot through him. It came out of nowhere, so intense it locked his jaw, clenching every muscle in his body, like he’d been hit with a cattle prod. It took him a few seconds to realize it came from the collar... then another few to realize he hadn’t done anything to trigger it.

Someone was operating the thing remotely.

The pain ratcheted higher. It got so bad he screamed.

Every few seconds, it arced higher still.

His whole body convulsed. It felt like the current vibrated his very bones, rattling them so hard they might splinter inside his flesh. He’d never experienced anything like it, not even while being tortured back on Old Earth.

The pain was so bad, his entire nervous system went into shock. He couldn’t even scream now, couldn’t make a sound. He couldn’t think through it, couldn’t see. He had no control over his body. He didn’t know where he was, or even whether he was still standing.

When it finally let up, he was on his hands and knees.

He stared down at the concrete, fighting to breathe.

He still couldn’t see. His vision blurred from the vibration of whatever the collar had done to him. His hands shook, his arms shook, his heart felt like it might explode in his chest. He managed to push himself up to kneeling and then his hands were on the collar, not pulling on it, just holding on. When he looked up, three of the Nazis stood over him. Past their bodies, he saw the chiefs being held back by guards with riot shields and batons.

Something about the sight brought a hard, clear understanding.

The guards were in on this.
 

The fire alarm was bogus––an excuse to minimize witnesses.

Whatever this was, the white supremacists were just errand boys.

Black’s mind clicked through his situation in less than a second. He saw the limits of his options, even before he saw the chiefs being herded back towards the main building.
 

Even so, the survival instinct was stronger.

He fought to get back to his feet, but the dark-eyed Aryan with the eagle tattoo punched down at him, a hard cross to his face, twisting his upper body in a skilled arc. The blow barely registered after the excruciating pain of the collar, but it briefly slowed his attempt to stand.

When Black tried to get up a second time, the collar lit up around his throat again.

Shock blanked out his mind.

The pain was so intense, so raw, he almost couldn’t recognize it as pain at all until his body and mind went back into a hard convulsion. In what might have been seconds... minutes... hours... even days... he forgot who he was, how he’d gotten here, what he’d been doing. He couldn’t move, couldn’t remember anything.

He lay there on the cement, unsure if he was even alive, or what planet he was on. The skin around his neck felt charred, like the collar now rested directly on bone.

Some part of him wondered if this was what being burned alive felt like.

Another part of him wondered if Miri would ever find out what happened to him.

He screamed for her in that dark, screaming her name, again and again...

He was pretty sure he wouldn’t survive this. There was no way he could survive even a minute more of this. Yet somehow, he did. Seconds... minutes... however long into that endless stretch of death-like pain... Black finally heard someone screaming back.

It took another blank stretch of silence before he realized that someone was him.

Twelve

NOT WHO BUT WHAT

TIME PASSED. I don’t know how much.

I don’t remember being aware of much of anything. For the rest of that night and most of the next day, I sat in a brightly-lit conference room, surrounded by plainclothes cops.

Some less-conscious part of me knew where I was.

Some even less-conscious part of me knew to check my watch every few minutes, counting down to when Dex and Kiko walked through that door, and when Angel and Nick got here with them. I knew enough to remember Kiko telling me they were bringing the company jet. They’d sent ahead experienced trackers on Black’s helicopters already.

Nick and Angel would be on that jet, too.

The trackers were supposed to go straight to the Port Authority, so they were likely down there already. I was only a few miles away from them now, at the Los Angeles Port Police building. Via Black’s Pentagon connections, Black Securities and Investigations now had a formal role on this.

So did I, as an employee, which is the only reason they’d let me in the room.

Someone from Black’s spec ops days was coming out too, and they wanted to talk to me.

Harrison... something. Or maybe something Harrison. The details blurred.

Like me, Kiko had more faith in Black’s guys than she did the LAPD, or even Homeland Security and the F.B.I.

They’d tried to locate him via the RFID chip. I was the only one who had the frequency, but I’d given it to Kiko in the first minute or so we were talking.

They hadn’t gotten a signal.

Kiko said whoever took him likely extracted and smashed it.

Now, when I blinked my eyes, coming out of that strangely high-functioning daze, I looked around the room and realized that the woman SWAT officer still sat beside me. I’d found out her name at some point: Jacquie. She wore an engagement ring when she took off the combat gloves she’d been wearing.

She’d told me as much as she could about what happened, and while I didn’t consciously remember that either, I remembered every detail she’d shared.

I had her tell Kiko everything she told me. Kiko promised every detail of that information was on its way to the trackers before we’d even hung up the phone.

Some of those details Jacquie gave still looped sickeningly in my mind.

He’d offered to go first. He’d offered.

He put himself in the line of fire.

My mind tried to make sense of that, couldn’t. I wondered if he knew they wouldn’t kill him. I also wondered if he’d suspected Uncle Charles. Whoever it was went to a fair bit of trouble to get Black alive. They’d also shown almost no regard for human life in the process. I understood why Black might have put two and two together, but I still didn’t think it was Uncle Charles. I doubt even my uncle was that good of an actor.

I’d called him right after I called Kiko the first time, and the sheer level of rage I felt on him after I described what happened, the fury in his voice when he told me he’d send someone, convinced me he didn’t orchestrate this.

No, my Uncle Charles didn’t take Black, not this time.

But I strongly suspected he knew who had.

I also intended to get that information out of whoever he sent.

Jacquie also told me––or maybe I read it on her––that whatever they hit Black with, it acted so fast he’d still been running when he went down. His legs crumpled within a second of his being hit. Jacquie and the others could only watch, helpless, as Black plowed forward into the cement. He hadn’t so much as raised an arm or hand to slow or catch his fall.

From Jacquie’s mind, it was disturbing as hell.

She’d been in the military, in addition to being in SWAT, and she was a decorated officer in both. She’d never seen anyone go down like that before. It had shaken her, even given everything else she’d been through that night.

Everything I’d heard in the conference room remained crystal-clear in my mind, too.

Sterling had been found dead in his home, along with his wife and kids.

The Homeland Security guys now thought the car outside the Los Angeles Theater was a plant, as well as the files they’d left inside. A good chunk of them now thought this whole thing had been orchestrated to kidnap Black.

I listened to them discuss it around the table, not knowing who I was.

Billionaire. Highly exclusive security company. Black ops background. Pentagon clearance. Government contractor. Could be a personal grudge from a past job or more likely something to do with intelligence. Unlikely to be ransom. Black was single, no family. He was on the books as an orphan, a product of the system. If someone was blackmailing the company, they would have reached out by now. They wouldn’t go this long with zero contact.

As for the hit itself, they mapped out the probable sequence.

Get him off his home turf, away from his people, disguise the op with a totally unrelated crime, possibly even a staged one. Replace his normal back-up team with a police force unequipped to handle a military-grade extraction...

They went on and on.

A few details stood out sharper in my mind.

They believed he’d likely been transported out of the United States. A few speculated he might be halfway across the world by now, on his way to some country or private organization’s black site––maybe in Morocco or Eastern Europe.

Just listening to them speculate about it aloud made me physically sick.